Stained glass window panels

Take a couple of panels of stained glass, add a cedar frame and create art for your windows!

Hey strangers!

Where have you been?! It’s been so long since I’ve touched base with you – are you ignoring me?

Kidding – and with my apologies – I’ve been working hard, but certain life problems and projects have interrupted my work flow.

Take these stained glass windows I helped a friend with back in May – they have been sitting on my photo reel waiting for editing, but life got in the way.

My friend Dayna asked if I could frame up these stained glass panels so that she could hang them her front window. I guess they’d been sitting in her garage for years because the lead holding the glass together was too weak to actually hang the stained glass from. There were two panels and both needed framing up so that they could finally decorate her home.

No problem!

I ripped down some 1 ½” thick cedar to 1 ½” wide and cut a rabbit (a groove), wide enough that the glass would fit into it, into each board.

Once my boards were all rabbited I just cut some mitre corners and framed up the stained glass with a bit of wood glue and finishing nails.

This was a GREAT project for using my Bessey strap clamps; the stained glass panes were fairly frail, so I didn’t want to use traditional clamps and only exert pressure on certain sides/areas of the wood. Cedar is also a very soft wood, so traditional clamps (if clamped tightly) would have also dented the wood. The strap clamps allowed me to hold all of the sides in place around the glass panel with equal pressure evenly distributed throughout.

It’s not a must-have, but it certainly made for a better, stronger result for this project.

I tucked some dish towels underneath the glass section before sanding down to 220 grit. The vibration of the sander, along with the gap between the glass itself and the table surface, would have had the pane rattling everywhere and potentially broken it.

Dayna opted to leave the cedar as-is/was (without stain) so that the wood would naturally patina over time and keep with the look of the gorgeous glass panes.

I added two eye hooks to each panel and Dayna hung them in her front windows with a bit of chain.